The trade show floor is electric. Your booth team is engaging in great conversations, scanning badges, and collecting dozens, maybe even hundreds, of promising new contacts. The event feels like a massive success. But what happens when the displays are packed away and everyone is back in the office?
Too often, this is where the momentum dies. That pile of promising leads, collected with significant investment in time and resources, becomes a source of frustration. Follow-ups are generic, delayed, or missed altogether. The connection made on the show floor fades, and potential revenue evaporates.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The leads captured at an event are some of the most valuable your team will ever get. They’ve met you face-to-face and shown direct interest. With the right strategy—powered by the right tools like the CONEXSYS MyLEADS Solution—you can turn those brief encounters into closed deals. Here’s how.
- Speed is Non-Negotiable: Following up within the first hour dramatically increases engagement. Your process must eliminate manual delays.
- Context is King: Go beyond the business card. Use notes and custom questions to capture the “why” behind the conversation for truly personal follow-up.
- Integrate and Measure: Seamlessly push event leads into your CRM to trigger immediate action and track the journey from handshake to revenue.
In the world of event follow-up, speed is everything. The impact of your conversation diminishes with every passing hour. According to a landmark study by Harvard Business Review:
Companies that follow up with a lead within an hour are nearly seven times more likely to have a meaningful conversation.
- Ditch the Manual Entry: Waiting until you’re back in the office to manually type business card data into your CRM is a recipe for delay. With the MyLEADS Mobile app by CONEXSYS, your team’s leads are captured digitally, in real-time. They can be exported and uploaded to your CRM before your team even leaves the show floor, allowing follow-up to begin immediately while the memory of your conversation is still fresh.
- Segment for Priority: Not all leads are created equal. During the initial conversation, identify and record key qualifiers (e.g., budget, timeline, decision-making authority) in the app. This allows the sales team to prioritize their follow-up list, focusing on the most promising prospects first.
The most significant advantage of a modern lead retrieval system is the ability to capture context, not just contact information. This is your sales team’s secret weapon for personalization.
- Use Your Notes! The notes field in the app is your most valuable asset. Encourage your booth staff to jot down key details from the conversation. What specific pain point did the prospect mention? Did they talk about a particular project or timeline? Are they a current customer of a competitor?
- Qualify with Custom Questions: Before the event, set up custom qualifiers in your lead retrieval portal. These could be questions like:
- What is your primary business challenge? (e.g., Cost, Efficiency, Scalability)
- What is your purchasing timeline? (e.g., <3 months, 3-6 months, 6+ months)
- Which product are you most interested in?
This on-the-spot data capture is the fuel for hyper-personalized follow-up that actually gets replies.
A generic, “Nice to meet you at the show” email is destined for the trash folder. Your follow-up needs to prove you were listening.
- Reference the Conversation: Use the notes and qualifiers you collected. A powerful opening sounds like this:
- Hi [Name], it was great speaking with you at [Event Name] on Tuesday. I recall you mentioning the challenges you’re facing with [Specific Pain Point]. I’ve attached a case study that shows how we helped another company in the [Their Industry] industry solve a similar problem.
- Offer Value, Not Just a Sales Pitch: Your first follow-up shouldn’t be a hard sell. Offer something of value based on your conversation. This could be a relevant whitepaper, a link to a webinar recording, or a blog post that addresses their challenges.
- Develop a Winning Follow-Up Playbook: One email is a hope; a strategic playbook is a plan. Instead of relying on single actions, a playbook outlines a complete series of touchpoints to engage a prospect across multiple channels. A powerful play, for example, might combine a personalized email, a LinkedIn connection request to put a face to a name, and a value-driven phone call a few days later. Modern sales platforms can help you build and automate these plays, ensuring your follow-up is both persistent and professional, and that no lead goes cold.
For follow-up to be truly effective, it must be systematic. Leads from events need to be seamlessly integrated into your company’s existing sales and marketing processes.
- Immediate CRM Integration: The ability to instantly export leads from the MyLEADS portal into a clean, CSV file means you can get them into your CRM or marketing automation platform in minutes. This triggers your established nurture campaigns and assigns tasks to the appropriate sales reps without delay.
- Track Everything: Once in the CRM, track the journey of your event leads meticulously. Tag them by the event name. Ask the critical questions: How many converted to opportunities? Which conversations generated the most pipeline? What was the final ROI of the event? This data is crucial for proving the value of your trade show participation and refining your strategy for future events.
The true ROI of your event is built in your post-show follow-up, which requires tools that capture rich context and conversation notes, not just contact details. Since the event organizer selects the official lead retrieval provider, their choice is key to your success. As you plan your next event, let the organizer know you require a professional solution like MyLEADS by CONEXSYS to maximize your results. Contact us for a simple one-pager to help you make the request.